抄録
The background to this paper can be found in the importance attached to the study of 'contemporary issues' in the Report issued in 1992 by the Lifelong Learning Council of the Ministry of Education on the subject of "Policies for the promotion of lifelong learning in response to future social trends". The issues include social problems concerned with the environment, a gender-equal society, media literacy, social welfare and so on. Focusing particularly on the study of a "gender-equal society", this paper deals with efforts to get to grips with contemporary issues at global, national, and local community level. At the global level, international women's conferences sponsored by the United Nations are an important factor. At the national level, the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society, 1999, and the Law for the Prevention of Spousal Violence and the Protection of Victims of 2001 are of critical importance. At the local community level, many study programs about gender equality are provided at various lifelong learning facilities. In the context of examining what kind of learning programs are created for this kind of study, the paper takes as a central concept that of "people as reflective learners"; inherent in this concept is the possibility of transforming a given society into a more democratic society, and the paper looks at citizen-planned lectures led by citizens with a highly developed sense of problem awareness. Trends of this kind also permeate the critical pedagogy of H. Giroux and the post-modernist feminist pedagogy of E. Tisdell. As they argue, adult learners in the capacity of "reflective learners" can often transform their own cognitive perspective and identity within a framework of deepening their own study of contemporary issues. At this stage, people, acting as a social human agency, can lobby the United Nations, national and local agencies, using formal procedures and non-formal bodies such as NGOs or NPOs. The paper discusses the extent to which, by adopting a critical posture toward existing society, a more democratic society can be constructed.
